Sick and Tired

[Administrator]

Hello,

To anyone who can see this message...

I checked the site today, and there were 18 users active in the last 5 minutes. Of course, likely none of those users was real - the vast majority were hack attempts.

Heck, for all I know, they've been succeeding. The forum software is fairly out of date, and updating will be complicated.

So, I turned on "Login Required". You won't see this unless you log in - and the only person I know who actually logs in is Mooselake (Hey Mooselake   ).

I will probably leave things this way for a bit to give any would-be attackers time to pick a new target.

Sorry for the inconvenience, if any.

Since you logged in, whoever you are, why don't you make a post a start a conversation here?

I hope all are faring well during the pandemic.

Adminstrator

[Administrator]

Well, I put it back to normal. Many of the bots just switched to trying to Register...

Sigh. Anyway, it was a fun experiment.

Maybe they lost interest anyway.

Admin

[Mooselake]

It's probably a mix of spammer scans (the idea is mostly to increase links to their site and raise search priorities) and search engines, sort of the norm for any site that allows posting.  Most of them are just looking for low hanging fruit, enough of that around most needn't work any harder. 

While I haven't been an active poster for quite a while I keep an open window and try to check the forum for new traffic most days.

We were gone from the Mooselake Manor for close to two years, snowbird winter turned into a year of knee issues (artificial joint bad infection) and medical attention.  A single floor house in Florida 40 minutes from appropriate medical care vs 3 flights of stairs in an old farmhouse with an 8 hour drive to specialists, not a tough decision.  Been cleaning things up and ran across my box of non-functional of QU-BD RPM parts just today.  At least I've got some NEMA 23s I can do something with.

I've sort of got my old Zenbot Mini going, although it's got a missed step issue.  I replaced the Geckodrive G540 controller with Bart Dring's grbl_ESP332 3 driver board (of course he announced a major improvement a couple weeks later, sort of my signature move) and DRV8825s (one smoked the second day, seems to be the norm for cheap stepsticks).   Even turned down to 1.5A (for the 2A steppers) the drivers are (motors barely above room temp) running hot, another amazon cycle to replace the hard-in-tube Arctic Alumina thermal adhesive to wring a little more out of the heatsinks, and a voltage convertor to get 12V for a couple fans out of the 24V supply (almost all installed) and we'll see what crops up next.  I did make a set of 6x7cm numbered blocks out of soft maple for the grandaughter (her new brother is closing in on 2 weeks old) where I encountered the issue, a 50x120mm cnc'd box worked fine before that.  I think it's complaining about being awoken from it's 10 year long slumber.  Or maybe it's sulking that I got a 3018 last summer, and have learned a lot from it...